We live today in a mobile world. Many people travel frequently, either for work or for pleasure, and are not at their usual address at any given time. This can cause problems in delivery of packages, mail, and the like, since a person expecting a package may not be at the delivery address on the date of delivery and thus may miss delivery of an important package. In addition, a person may desire that co-workers, friends, and family members easily be able to know his or her whereabouts on a particular date. Although a person leaving a particular address either permanently or for a long period of time can utilize a change of address procedure as provided, for example, by the United States Postal Service, these conventional change-of-address procedures have a disadvantage in that there often is a substantial delay in updating the address to be used, making such procedures impractical for making short-term temporary changes in address. These conventional change-of-address procedures also do not permit a person to make the changes to their address themselves, but require a person to rely on a third party, for example, the Postal Service, to make those changes, thereby incurring the risk of error in, for example, the new address, the effective date, or the like. In addition, such conventional change-of-address procedures do not permit a person to control who may have access to the new address information.
Previous patents directed to electronic commerce are not directed to the addressing and delivery problems solved by the present invention. One such electronic commerce patent is U.S. Pat. No. 5,557,518. This patent discloses a system of electronic commerce that permits the purchase and delivery of electronic merchandise or services with real time anonymous payment or real-time authorization-base payment, where neither the customer nor the merchant can interfere with the payment and delivery system once they have agreed to the transaction. The '518 patent also discloses the use of trusted agents and money modules to create a system for facilitating electronic commerce. However, this patent does not address the problem of permitting a trusted agent to obtain a real-time address for delivery of merchandise purchased in an online transaction. Neither does U.S. Pat. No. 6,119,101, which discloses the use of personal agents that can represent customers, merchants, or both, to facilitate electronic commerce while protecting the anonymity of customers.
In addition, other patents directed to address databases and/or package processing do not address these problems. One such patent, U.S. Pat. No. 6,081,827, provides a method for processing a piece of mail to be physically delivered from a sender to a recipient by a delivery service, wherein an electronic address of the sender is encoded into a bar code that is read by the recipient using a bar code reader, and wherein upon such reading of the bar code, a message is communicated to the electronic address of the sender. In the '827 patent, the bar code contains the address of the sender, whereas the bar code generated under the anonymous embodiment of the present invention contains the address of the recipient. Also, the '827 patent is not directed to solving the problem of permitting a purchaser to provide a real-time address to a merchant or a shipper while protecting the identity of the purchaser if the purchaser so desires.
Thus, there remains a need in the art to address the problems of providing a secure online address directory whereby address owners may be assured of the accuracy of the information they store and its security and which is available to authorized parties such as merchants or shippers on a read-only basis.